Over the past few days I have been digging into the DasBlog.  As part of that effort I needed to check out an item's link element in the RSS 2.0 Specification.  It was surprising to me (I don't follow this stuff very closely) that this is essentially the last version of RSS as described at the end of the specification and quoted here:

"The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1."

My Mom recently asked me about blogging software... "How do I get my own blog up an running."  This prompted a search on blogging software and I came across the following reviews:

• Blog Tools
• The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup

Personally I use Radio Userland but I wouldn't recommend this I don't think, at least not for my Mom.  I am looking to switch as well but I want something build on ASP.NET.  Dasblog is currently what my thinking is but since I haven't yet got it up and running I can't comment on whether this is realistic or not.

I started using the NedStatBasic web counters almost a week ago now.  One of the problems, however, was that each time I went to my own weblog to check that it was posting correctly I incremented the stats.

To avoid this problem I needed to change the script not to run if I hit the web page.  To do this I created a web page that would assign a cookie to me.  The code was as follows:

< HTML >
    < BODY
        onload="document.cookie = 'IsWebLogAuthor = true; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2010 00:00:01 GMT';">
    </BODY>
</HTML>

After hitting this page I had a cookie assigned.  Not that an expiration date is required to make sure that the cookie survives across sessions.

Next, I added a postStatistics(id, options) function to my #homeTemplate.txt page within Radio as follows:

<!-- BEGIN_CUSTOM_EDIT -->
<script>
    function postStatistics(id, options)
    {
      var isAuthor;
      var nameValue;
      var cookieArray = document.cookie.split(";");  
      for(var i=0; i<cookieArray.length; i++)
      {
          nameValue = cookieArray[i].split("=");
          if(nameValue.length==2 &&
              nameValue[0]=="IsWebLogAuthor" && nameValue[1]=="true")
          {
              isAuthor=true;
              break;
          }
      }
  
  if(!isAuthor)
  {
      nedstatbasic(id, options);
  }
  
}
</script>
<!-- END_CUSTOM_EDIT -->

Finally, in the NedStatBasic HTML source code I changed

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" >
<!--
    nedstatbasic("<my id>", 0);
// -->
</script>

to

 <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" >
 <!--
     postStatistics("<my id>", 0);
 // -->
 </script>

There was also a <noscript> block but since my browser has scripting enabled this HTML never appears so I didn't need to worry about it.

One thing that puzzled me somewhat about this was the fact that the document.cookie was stored across documents on this site.  In other words, setting the cookie on one page made it available to another page event though the cookie was a document property.  Interesting.

I would like to thank Palani Thangaraj for help with this.

Now this is pretty cool!  NedStatBasic offers free web counters.  It includes number of visits and the linking URLs along with all related statistics.  I added counters of my own to this weblog (see the  on the right). 

Thanks to Michael Stokesbary for this find.

After recently re-installing my laptop I tried to move the location of Radio.  This was an extremely frustrating experience, however.  I went to the Files/Folders and updated the location of my www folder.  Unfortunately, I didn't quite have the path correct and as a result everything stopped working.  The worst thing about this was that I could no longer access the Files/Folders location to correct the path.  Yuck!  Furthermore, I couldn't move the data to the specified path because the issue was that I was missing a trailing backslash.  Uggggg!  I tried searching the Radio Userland folder for where the path was stored but I couldn't find it anywhere.  To get things working again I had to restore an old copy of the entire Radio Userland folder.

As I continued to look in to this issue it occurs to me that there is a significant amount of user configuration data that is stored in the Radio Userland program folder, not just the www folder.  As a result if two people share the same computer they actually have to have separate instances of the entire program.  This is just silly.   Why can't user configuration data be stored in the user profile location (My Documents\Profiles\Application Data).  Even the registry would be better than the current choice.

Recently I have begun to notice the my blog shows up in a remarkable number of Google searches.  In an effort to minimize this occurrence Google announced  that it will remove blogs from its regular search engine and instead provide a blog specific search engine.  The primary reason is that all that blogs do is repost commentary on the main article making it difficult to find the primary source.

Hmmm.... I wonder if I ever do that?  :)

"This is a simple BloggerAPI client for PocketPC's, that can be use to edit and create posts for weblogging tools that support the BloggerAPI such as Blogger and Radio."

In an attempt to consider an ASP.NET based bloggar I joined the BlogX workspace on GotDotNet.  Unfortunately, getting started was not nearly as easy as I would have liked.  Here are the steps I took including the things that didn't work.

1. Ran Win WeblogX Setup and got the following error: Installation Incomplete - The Installer was interrupted before Blogx0.1 WeblogX could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.
2. Followed manual instructions located in the readme.html file but: 
   

   a) Step 3 does not indicate what permissions to provide on the virtual directory. I assume Read/Write?  Also, I created the virtual directory via the Security and Sharing menu on Windows Explorer, not through IIS which I presume is okay?
   b) In step 4 there was not Content or Logs directory.  I created them manually in the same directory as the SiteConfig directory. 
   c) After selecting "Create New" (not create new server) in WinBlogX an exception was thrown: "The request failed with HTTP status 401: Access Denied."

3. Ran WinSetup and got the following error: Installation Incomplete - The Installer was interrupted before Blogx0.1 could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.
4. After deleting the Vitual Directory that I created in 2a (above) I opened up IIS and created the virtual directory manually giving it read, script, execute and write permissions (note to self....remove write and execute once everything is working).
5. Gave IUSR_<ComputerName> Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, Read, and Write permissions on the Content, Logs and SiteConfig directories (Content and Logs directories were created manually back in step 2b).
6. Re-ran WinBlogX and got an unhandled exception: "Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml'."
7. Retrieved an updated copy of the source code but on attempting to compile I found I was missing the IsolatedUserSettings.cs and WMPCForm.cs files from the WinBlogX project.  Grrrrrr!!  (Sent email to the last person that checked in the csproj file to see if they could fix it.)
8. I removed references to the offending files and modified the code so that it compiled again. 
9. Re-running WinBlogX prompted me to save a winblogx file which I did.  I was then prompted with a dialog entitled "Annoying wait dialog."  The dialog included a counter and a kill button.  Unfortunately I waited until the counter reached 600,000 but it still didn't go away.  I resorted to the Kill Program button on the dialog.
10. Restarting seems to have loaded WinBlogX correctly so I proceeded to add a post.
11. After posting the same "Annoying wait dialog" appeared so I killed the program.  Again, on restart the post seems to have worked and appears when I go to the WebLog site. 

Certainly far from smooth but at this point I will consider BlogX setup.

For some time I have been interested in alternative solutions for Radio and WebLogging.  Here are the issues for me:

• Changing the date of a post, postdating or predating, does not seem to be supported.
• As an expert in Microsoft technologies, the means of customizing and developing in Radio is foreign to me and, therefore, cumbersome and slow.
• I would love to be able to use ASP.NET for my weblog so as to improve my ASP.NET skills.
• Any "framework" that I build up, such as a syntax highlighter or some such, I want to be able to take advantage of in other ASP.NET applications.
• I want to use a similar format for posting pictures and I don't seem to be able to get Radio to work for me in this regard.

In the past I have come across several alternatives that I would like to consider:

•  One of those is the Community Starter Kit sample in the ASP.NET StarterKits collection. 
• Another is to use Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services or Sharepoint Portal Server.  The advantage of the MS tools is the integrated security support, making it a common solution for other Michaelis.net users.  Of course the drawback is licensing. 
• Lastly, there is squishyFORUMS.  My hesitancy with the later is the SQL Server requirement.

Of course the most major factor in all this is time to investigate and develop.  Hmmmm.....

A great (and relatively simply) radio macro could automatically translate and ISBN number into a URL.  The format of the URL would be as follows:

http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/search?t=ISBN&q=0310233682

I could perhaps even use the title too:

http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/search?t=Title&q=Seven%20Habits%20of%20Higly%20Effective%20People

Another way of doing this would be to use a web service.  Again, a really simple macro....  Now all I need it time to write it.

Well, thanks to the help from Mark Paschal I was able to change the appearance of the Google It macro with HTML (see question from "Google It Macro").  It really was quite obvious in hind sight.  Here is the code I used:

<%radio.macros.googleIt(<%itemNum%>, "<font face=\"times\"> <font color=\"#0039b6\">G</font><font color=\"#c41200\">o</font><font color=\"#f3c518\">o</font><font color=\"#0039b6\">g</font><font color=\"#30a72f\">l</font><font color=\"#c41200\">e</font> Search It</font>")%>

and the result:

G o o g l e Search It

The key was not to place the macro on multiple lines and also to replace any "s with \".  Obviously, also make sure that both parameters are surrounded in "s.

Okay, I have finally been able to get Bloglet close to working.  I previously tried this but couldn't figure out a few of the settings.  This time when I tried, instead of specifying the weblog type as "Radio", I used RSS.  I also changed the server entry to be my rss file (http://mark.michaelis.net/weblog/rss.xml).  This seemed to enable everything and "Test Connection" passed.  I confess that I haven't actually received an email yet but I am hoping that this is due to a normal delay in service.

By the way, the final code that I added to my home page to allow users to subscribe was as follows:

<!-- BEGIN_CUSTOM_EDIT -->
    <form method="post" action="http://www.bloglet.com/subscribe.asp">
    <input type="hidden" name="ID" value="2081" />
    Subscribe To<br />
    <b>Mark's Weblog</b><br />
    <input type="text" name="email" value="" size="7" maxlength="100" />
    <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="subscribe"
      style="CLEAR: none; OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 100%;" ID="Submit1"/><br />
    <input type="hidden" name="redirect"
      value="http://mark.michaelis.net/weblog" />
<!-- END_CUSTOM_EDIT -->

I added a google search button to my weblog yesterday.  The following code was placed into my homepage template:

<!-- BEGIN_CUSTOM_EDIT -->
  <p>
    <FORM method=GET action=http://www.google.com/custom>
    <INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=7 maxlength=255 value="">
    <INPUT type=submit name=sa VALUE="Search">
    <br>
    <input type=hidden name=sitesearch value="mark.michaelis.net" checked>
    <input type=hidden name=filter value="0" checked>
    </FORM>
  </p>
<!-- END_CUSTOM_EDIT -->

This adds the following text box and button:

I took the code from the Radio Userland Search page.  Originally it included a line:

<INPUT type=hidden name=cof VALUE="AH:center;AWFID:901e54b48f490ab5;">

but I didn't know what that did and removing it did not seem to have any effect so I didn't include it.

Two features I would like to add it to limit searches to a particular category and not enable my homepage as a valid result.  Unfortunately, I was not able to figure out how to have Google limit the search beyond just a domain.

1/22/03: See followup discussion "More on the Google It Macro".

I came across the Google It macro yesterday and added it to my item template immediately below the title of each item.  The code I used was as follows:

<!-- BEGIN_CUSTOM_EDIT -->
  <br><font class="small" size="-1" color="gray" ><EM>
  <%radio.macros.googleIt (<%itemNum%>, "Search on it")%></EM></font>
<!-- END_CUSTOM_EDIT -->

I actually wanted to use HTML text (specifically the "Google Logo") in place of the "Search on it" text above but I couldn't figure out how to do this.  Only simply text seemed to be allowed.  I posted a question on this topic.

In playing around with the Google It Radio Userland macro I wanted to use the Google logo.  I was surprised to learn that this is simply text which the following HTML produces.

<font face="times" color="#0039b6">G</font>
<font face="times" color="#c41200">o</font>
<font face="times" color="#f3c518">o</font>
<font face="times" color="#0039b6">g</font>
<font face="times" color="#30a72f">l</font>
<font face="times" color="#c41200">e</font>

This shows up as: Google

I read about Ingo Rammer's attempt to place his weblog on to Exchange a few weeks ago but not it appears he has actually completed his effort.  Wow!!!  Check out OutBlog.  I am not using it yet but I am completely intrigued and tempted to give it a try as soon as I have a day to install and move everything over.  I should probably verbalize what I am hoping to gain from the move rather than simply doing it for technologies sake.

Anther really cool piece of software that I hadn't come across before was Avant Browser (thanks Phil Wu).  This is essentially a wrapper around IE so that instead of having tons of IE windows open up you get tabs at the bottom of the Avant Browser screen.  I still haven't got used to using CTRL-TAB rather than ALT-TAB but I am getting there.  One of the most appreciated features is that when restarting Avant it opens up all the previously opened URLS.  Very cool since I seldom get to read all the open URLs before shutting down my laptop.

A few months ago I read an opinion that one of the reasons Radio Userland did not have the top weblog spot was that it didn't have a spell checker.  Well, although this is true I found and easy work around today.  IESpell offers this feature and it is freeware for personal use.

Tools of the day: IESpell